To quote CliffordAdams?: “There are two very different kinds of voting on Wiki. One is a simple count of agreeing voters, where a vote is simply a shorthand for “I also like this”.

The other kind of vote attempts to decide a community disagreement. This kind of vote is controversial. There is a Wiki tradition of consensus decisions, with the possibility of a veto from the site owner.”

For more discussion on the goodnesss or badness of the second type of vote, see AboutVoting.

I would be really interested in seeing AutomatedWikiVoting?. Could anyone point me to wiki software supporting it? AutomatedWikiVoting? would be a flexible tool on the path to implementing many good ideas like RatingGroups? and RatingAsContent? within a Wiki. These are tools that would allow a large Wiki with a high turnover rate (for instance, a WikiWebLog?) to support subcommunities with different interests. – BayleShanks – BayleShanks

a comment on Wiki:ValidateChangesByVoting: could make it much harder to automatically attack Wikis (i’m new here and haven’t seen any of these, but I’m sure they’ll happen much more as Wiki’s get bigger) if you require the validations to come from different subnets. But at those cost of making wikis seem more complicated to newcomers. I would not recommend this until attacks were becoming a problem (does this comment belong on this page? i would put it on ValidateChangesByVoting?, but I though WikiWiki? preferred to have new meta-Wiki talk over here rather than there; I certainly would) – BayleShanks

The parliamentary system will be used sparingly; hopefully all of the real discussion will be carried out informally, and the parliamentary system is used only as a formal, impartial mechanism to record which decisions have been made by the group.

There will no longer be any cases where everybody’s time is wasted by an argument against some community rule, based on the possibility that hey, maybe only the loud people like the rule, how do we know there’s “consensus”? Because there will be a formal, well-defined process to determine what “the rules” really are.

There will no longer be any case where an elder community member with administrative powers will be required to use their judgement about whether to ban someone, and then face criticism if the community disagrees after the fact about the fairness of that action. Because it will be easy for the community itself to ban someone by passing a motion to ban them.

However, substantive discussions about changing the rules will be expected to take place primarily informally.

The source code running the wiki will be able to be changed automatically by passing a motion to change the code (a CommunityProgrammableWiki).

The parliamentary procedure and LiquidDemocracy voting system will prevent community members from being overwhelmed by more formal proposals than they have time to deal with.

The idea is that it will be very clear to everyone what the process is for making community rules, and what the current rules are. The process will not require anyone to guess when there is a “silent consensus”. There will be no need for a GodKing? even for most administration because the community itself will be able to ban people, and to reconfigure and upgrade the software.

The larger picture is that this is hoped to be a scalable, efficient way for a even a large wiki community to govern itself1 and to upgrade its software, and ultimately a testbed for new kinds of mass democratic government.